William Pye - Water Sculpture

Anglo-American invited William Pye to devise a water sculpture for their seven-storey atrium, which has glazed lifts at one side. They required a structure that would divert the attention of those going up and down in the lifts from the surrounding open-plan offices on every floor.
In meeting the brief, Pye realised that the structure had to be very tall, but not too bulky as to appear oppressive and over dominant, especially at the lower levels. Wanting to extend the vocabulary of his roll-wave series by introducing both concave and convex vertical surfaces to the structure, he drew on the famous photographic image of a Nautilus Shell taken by Edward Weston in the nineteen thirties; he recognised how the interior form of the shell might be interpreted sculpturally. A section through the shell reveals an inner structure comprised of a series of spiralling chambers, and Pye imagined portions extended to different levels up from the picture plane to create a stepped monolith. He made drawings which were later rendered onto a CAD programme both to verify the image and to ëtuneí the proportions.

View the finished piece - Nautilus.